I just purchased the Asus/AMD parts for a new build to unlock and overclock to get a bit of power from the CPU, i.e., 24/7 stable OC. I'm neither particularly interested in benchmarking results or looking to break records.

I only tested them (on top of the motherboard's cardboard box) to unlock the cores and for their stability. I never tried to overclock.

Seeing this Intel/Gigabyte bundle on sale I am tempted to upgrade and sell the old parts because Intel is better performing.

The new bundle seems to meet my needs, except it has Intel HD graphics which should be able to run 1080p videos.

QuickSync is getting a lot of applications written to use it. BadaBoom and Mirillis Splash EX are two that encode pretty darn quick using it. AFAIK AMD has nothing like it.

Yeah, but the real question is "Is QuickSync even meaningful for the 99.9999% of the public who don't participate in the forums here?" I guess it will appeal to the ever present moron contingent who believe that they simply cannot do any work on their PC if they are not home AND awake AND watching it at all the same time. Since I do 100% of my encodes while I am away from the house, sleeping, or doing something away from the computer, I really could not possibly care less about QuickSync. Wow. My encode that normally completed during the night while I slept now completes even faster. Whoop de do!

The OP said nothing about video encoding, and I recall an earlier thread about PSUs where he specifically said he wasn't going to do any. He said will be multitasking with Fire Fox, Google Chrome , IE, Paint.Net and Excel in the other thread.

I'm not sure how much difference the extra horsepower is going to make for these kinds of activities, but an i5-2500K is the better of the two CPUs.

The OP might get a better performance bump by switching to a SSD boot drive.
I've found that a 120Gb or 160Gb are large enough for my needs.
The 120Gb I'm on now shows 75.4 free of 111Gb. That is with some video applications loaded as well other stuff. I do have data drives too.

But the bump in perceived performance from the SSD is great. Things load so much faster.
I put SSDboot drives in all my computers.
I've also found that if Windows needs to use virtual memory that the SSD makes that happen much faster so the computer seems faster.

Cheers

If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself.

SSDs are nice, and certainly give fast boot times, but unless your application is disk-bound, there's little point, which is why I don't have an SSD on my work computer (2.5 GHz quad, 8 GB, 3 HDs) which is usually on 24x7. The gaming rig is another matter, however the OP wasn't planning such.

Well It isn't only the boot times that I love a SSD for.
Application loads times are very fast.
Any virtual access times are fast

I have a slow laptop (econo model) that went from tolerable to useable with a SSD.
I used to click on IE and wait, with the SSD it pops up.
Antivirus / Antimalware scans go much faster.
I have a program that used to churn, churn, churn the hard drive loading or saving at shutdown. With the SSD it pops up ready to go and shuts down fast.

Since I do not believe in leaving a computer running 24/7 I like the fast boot time. Why I don't believe in running 24/7. Wear and tear. Electricity bill.

When I can turn on My Toshiba laptop and less than 20 to 30 seconds later be working. I'll shut down.
My other laptop is on 2 or 3 times a month for Billpay and online banking and income tax.
This little i3 I'm on is just as fast starting up.
It'll be off for forty hours. Then on for 9 hours.
My i7 video hobby work machine is on 1 to 2 days a week.

I want fast booting.
I want things to pop onto the screen.
Right now I have a program creating a large database on this SSD boot drive, and the disk speed is still good for doing other things while it creates the necessary structures.

A SSD is much better at handling disc access from several programs at once.

Cheers

If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself.

I guess it will appeal to the ever present moron contingent who believe that they simply cannot do any work on their PC if they are not home AND awake AND watching it at all the same time. Since I do 100% of my encodes while I am away from the house, sleeping, or doing something away from the computer, I really could not possibly care less about QuickSync. Wow. My encode that normally completed during the night while I slept now completes even faster. Whoop de do!

i have seen you say variations of this in a few posts now and i just have to say that it is a silly position to take. by your logic there is never any compelling reason to upgrade since your task will eventually complete anyway. why not stick with a 500mhz P3 and wait the month it would take to complete a 20mb/s 1080p encode?

i can give your a few very good reasons why it's to your benefit to build a system that completes your encodes as quickly as possible:

1) the longer you keep your cpu at full load the more electricity you use, if you sit down and calculate the amount of juice used for an 8-9 hour encode at full cpu load versus a 2-3 hour encode at full load, the amount adds up significantly over the course of a year.

2) mean time to failure and mean time before failure; 2 metrics used to estimate the expected lifespan of a given piece of equipment; running the cpu at full load for 8 hours at a time, as is done by an overnight encode, you not only run the cpu at it's peak but you also load up the power supply as well as hammering the hard drive(s) with constant read/write operations over the course of 8 hours. it shouldn't be too big a stretch to conclude that you are shortening the lifespan of your power supply and hard drives with long encodes.

3) with a faster cpu it allows you to use higher quality settings; i used to have an i3 2100 (dual core with HT) and upgraded to an i5 2400 (quad core). the 2100 could do a given divx test encode, at "high performance" preset, 4 pass, 1080p 12mb/s roughly 30 minute source in a bit over 2 hours; the 2400 did the same encode in about 90 minutes. keeping in mind that the analysis passes don't load up the cores to more than about 25%, i redid the test encode on the 2400 but this time used the "balanced" preset with everything else being the same; the i5 still smoked the i3 by about 30 minutes while producing a significantly higher quality encode.

similarly, a 28 minute source, using the fastest preset with tmpg for x264, was converted in a bit over 20 minutes on the i3, with the i5 the same encode took a hair over 10 minutes, exactly twice as fast. the gap grows as the quality settings increase and the i5 allows me to do a 2 pass encode with significantly more aggressive quality settings in the same time that the i3 could do with lower settings.

then there's this reality, if all you're going to do is encode 1 video every once in a while, then yes, i can see someone concluding that it's now worth building a faster pc but if you have to encode hundreds of videos, for instance transcoding your video captures to a tablet friendly format, then you will be setting up a batch encode job and a single encode taking the whole night is simply unacceptable.

Since I do not believe in leaving a computer running 24/7 I like the fast boot time. Why I don't believe in running 24/7. Wear and tear. Electricity bill.

2) mean time to failure and mean time before failure; 2 metrics used to estimate the expected lifespan of a given piece of equipment; running the cpu at full load for 8 hours at a time, as is done by an overnight encode, you not only run the cpu at it's peak but you also load up the power supply as well as hammering the hard drive(s) with constant read/write operations over the course of 8 hours. it shouldn't be too big a stretch to conclude that you are shortening the lifespan of your power supply and hard drives with long encodes.

besides the electricity logic ( which i also support but it is not so true in this case. First of all faster cpu ( or components ) use more power per se than lower power and "slower" cpus so in the end 8 hours slower can equal 6 hours faster ( there is not just no free launch in economics it is in the computer science also. Another thing is that faster cpu heats more ( yeah i5 is hotter than i3 ( from the same family and even i5 slower is cooler than i5 faster) even more cores also more hotter ) so you use your coolers on more rpm to maintain the same temp so in the end the cpu coolers add to the electricity bill ( not to mention noise ) a little but you see the logic.

And it the end the pc components are made to last 24/7 ( literally what do people with servers do they even don't care for electricity) 5-7 years ( and till that day comes your pc will be obsolete meaning technologically not economically ).
I still have Compaq Armada laptop Pentium 3 576 sd ram working around 20/7 and still goes after 10 years doesn't seems to slow ether ( it servers me for internet pdf books email word excel you name it )

deadrats - One of the reasons a lot of people push for quick encodes is that they will not do anything on their PCs unless they are watching over it. Of course if you have, say, 100 videos to encode you would want them to be done quickly. My point, perhaps badly stated, is that if you are just encoding a few videos and you would just do them in batch mode while you sleep and they complete in time, there's no push to be pay for more power just because you have some belief that it's "unsafe" to leave your computer running all the time so you have to be sort of hovering over your PC and putting your life on hold while it encodes. And yes, there are really people that honestly believe that they simply cannot leave their PCs on while they are away, sleeping, etc.

I've done it both ways, Batch encoding overnight and while I'm at the computer.

One problem with the Batch encoding that can happen is interruptions in the electricity supply. I've seen people that corrupted their windows or killed the power supply due to leaving it on all the time and the power went on and off rapidly several times.

Mine is on a adequately sized for output wattage as well as total VA, UPS.

For example I on the I7 I can be encoding, browsing the internet, email, etc. without the encoding impacting the perceived performance of the computer. It can be encoding a video file at the same time I am authoring a already encoded file. No problem.

Encoding Source drive, destination drive and the drives I'm authoring from / to are all different physical drives to eliminate that causing a slowdown.

If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself.

the point is guys that he can do all that with amd Phenom II X4 960T and maybe 10% slower ( it isn't like he is changing old and slow components to very fast and exceptionable new comp). So the real question from the start was is it worth it option A vs option B from my stand point of view is not plain and simple. It is economic crisis for god sake and now more than ever price performance is important why to sell ( and lose money of course ) on amd to gain 5-10% if so on intel version and give more money ( if it is new ) so he loses twice with no big real benefit it doesn't ad to the logic

Well It isn't only the boot times that I love a SSD for.
Application loads times are very fast.
Any virtual access times are fast

Oh yeah. Programs come up almost instantly. That's one upgrade that you'll really feel is worth the money. More RAM is good of course, but you won't perceive nearly as much difference.

For the boot/load speed racers liking SSD for their OS drive, having more RAM is mandatory to avoid pagefile use. Generally these same people aren't smart enough to move their write intensive operations off that drive. Then again, that same memory will help the performance on any system. While page use if faster, you're aging that drive dramatically.

Though, I do thank these same people for buying all these drives. It'll help get the cost down so the pay-back will be more reasonable sooner.

Well It isn't only the boot times that I love a SSD for.
Application loads times are very fast.
Any virtual access times are fast

Oh yeah. Programs come up almost instantly. That's one upgrade that you'll really feel is worth the money. More RAM is good of course, but you won't perceive nearly as much difference.

For the boot/load speed racers liking SSD for their OS drive, having more RAM is mandatory to avoid pagefile use. Generally these same people aren't smart enough to move their write intensive operations off that drive. Then again, that same memory will help the performance on any system. While page use if faster, you're aging that drive dramatically.

Though, I do thank these same people for buying all these drives. It'll help get the cost down so the pay-back will be more reasonable sooner.

Sorry, but the cost/performance is not even close yet.

The fact that some people don't know what they're doing is not an argument on the merits of SSDs. Sure, it's become something of a fad now.

I have OS and programs only on my SSDs. All write operations possible are performed on separate mechanical hard drives. Drives are aligned and defrag turned off for the SSDs. The machine I'm writing this on has 16 GB RAM.

There *is* widespread disagreement as to whether one should disable/move the page file, or just reduce the size to more "reasonable" proportions. This article says no:

It's my understanding that this was more of an issue with early SSDS, much less so now. And with adequate RAM, page file is used rarely anyway. The article above says that the proportion of reads/writes is on the order of 40:1.

Anyway, IMO a smallish SSD is good for an OS drive, and in no way are SSDs cost effective for storage. If one keeps out a sharp eye for deals, one can be had for ~ $1/GB. Worth it to some people. And I reiterate that you'll really notice it when you change to an SSD for boot drive, moreso than bumping up RAM.

I have SSDs in two laptops.
One went from sluggish to usable.
The other is just faster in most of what I do.
I also worked on a Thinkpad for someone recently that was running XP from the factory on a Samsung SSD.

The one that was sluggish is the one I do my online banking, billpaying and Income taxes on.
My normal usage pattern on that one is login and pay a bill, copy verification page into Wordpad, save, clear the browser caches. Close the browser and repeat for the next bill. It used to be click to start the browser, wait a few seconds, work. We are only talking seconds saved for each step but..... I could dig up a dual core processor for it to speed it up but the SSD was easier to swap, do the System recovery and ready to go. No Browsing the Internet or email on it.

In laptops the benefits are:

Lighter (slight)
Less power used, Two ways at least. less power consumed, Less used in starting up before the computer is ready to use, Faster resume. Faster shutdown
Faster than the old 5400 RPM drive.
Much more immune to being damaged by Vibrations or impact. I've seen more than one Laptop that was dropped and the only damage was the dead hard drive. Or the laptop was toast and the data was going to be expensive to recover. With a SSD........
Runs much cooler

Since the usage of the drive is around 30 to 35 gig on a 120Gb and a 160Gb there is plenty of room for wear leveling. Which will of course enhance the drives life before it wears out.
On all my SSD equipped computers the worst case is still over 2/3rds of the drive empty.
I made sure to buy large enough to ensure plenty of free space for wear leveling and Garbage collection (Trim) and longer life.

If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself.